VLC 2.0 Unifies Android Apps, Adds Network Browsing

VLC is deservedly known as one of the best media players. It’s full of features for power users, but at the core of it is great support for almost every type of media. Even the more obscure formats can play smoothly in VLC. It’s Android and Android TV apps are great apps to download in general for playing any kind of media.

Although they have for a while had both an Android TV and an Android mobile version of their app. With the upcoming update, version 2.0, they are consolidating the two together. This should make development faster as they won’t need to split their time maintaining two codebases. It also makes a lot of sense since the only difference is some of the UI. In fact, one additional feature is the ability to browse media on your phone using the Leanback UI.

VLC, which stands for VideoLAN Client (in which LAN stands for Local Area Network), is adding a new feature for their Android app that will allow you to connect to “network disk browsing (Windows shares, UPnP, NFS, FTP, SFTP…)”. For those who have a lot of movies and TV shows on a computer drive, this will allow you to connect to it and stream media from that disk to your TV (or phone). If you’re familiar with Plex, this is similar. It opens up a lot of media that you may have had in your home but did not have an easy way to watch it.

The entire changelog is here:

2.0 introduces a large number of features, notably network disk browsing (Windows shares, UPnP, NFS, FTP, SFTP…), favorite folders and URLs, video playlists, rewritten notifications and control, popup video and a rewritten history.
It is also a merge of Android TV and Android versions, so that every device can optionally get the Android TV interface. The TV interface has been improved quite a bit too. Finally, it should be faster to decode and playback all video types.

If you’re not seeing it right now, it’s because it’s still rolling out to everyone. You can bypass the wait by visiting APK Mirror. I’m pretty excited for these new changes and they’ll definitely be useful for me.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.